When I was at LSI Logic in the mid and late 1980s I had a chance to meet with and work with some of the titans of computing. In a lot of cases not the publicly recognizable titans, but people who profoundly changed and influenced the nature of computing, laying the foundation for the types of devices and experiences we take for granted today.
One of those people is Gordon Bell, and I met him when he was the head of engineering at Ardent Computer. Yes, that Gordon Bell. The architect of the Digital Equipment VAX. The recipient of the National Medal of Technology and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal.
I met with Gordon to understand how complete their system architecture was and what he felt the remaining challenges and risks would be. I loved hanging out with him – he was as brilliant as he was affable – comfortable in his own skin.
Along the way we talked about all sorts of stuff, and discovered we both liked sports cars. A lot. Back then, when Silicon Valley seemed to be driven more by a collective desire to simply push the state of computing forward, and less so about making a ton of money, sports cars were just more affordable. On an engineer’s salary you could own a Porsche, even a Ferrari. And lots of folks I worked with did.
An ad from 1985 for a 911 cabriolet
In fact, Palo Alto High School would have a car show – where people would bring their cars and park them on the football field and then folks like me (and presumably Gordon) could wander around and slobber all over the range of cars. And this car show was primarily Porsches, Ferraris, and Shelby Cobras. The cars that were casually displayed on that football field are worth millions today. Back then, tens of thousands.
And it turns out that Silicon Valley had some real racing expertise in its back yard. I discovered this by accident, when I was looking to buy a house and found one I liked in Los Gatos. The yard was literally strewn with Porsche 911s in various states of repair. When I asked the real estate agent who the seller was she said Jerry Woods. It would be years later that I realized that Jerry Woods is the technical genius and chief mechanic of the Porsche 935 Paul Newman helped take to second place in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. I should have bought that house — and the cars!
But I digress. Actually, this is a great example of the nature of the conversations Gordon and I would have about cars. Going deep down these tangents, then remembering to bring the conversation back to engineering and semiconductors.
My favorite memory was him telling me how he had just purchased a Porsche 911.
He went on to say how much he hated going to car dealers. He just hated the whole process of being somewhere unfamiliar like that, and being at the mercy of a salesperson who had the upper hand on information.
So he said he called the local Porsche dealer in Palo Alto, and asked to speak with a salesperson. When he got that person on the phone he asked “Do you have this month’s edition of Road and Track? Go find it and call me back.”
When the salesperson called him back he said “Turn to page 7. Do you see that 911 in that ad? I want that car. And I want it in this specific color. And I want you to deliver it to me here at the office. I will have my bank make payment on my behalf. You just need to show up with the car and paperwork. We can sign it all here.”
There was silence.
The salesperson tried in vain to talk Gordon out of this.
As Gordon told me this story he was almost giddy with delight. I think he got as much pleasure from how he bought that car as he did from driving it.
And talk about a forward thinker. People buy cars like this all the time now. Back in 1985? He must have been the first.
In the space of a few hours I devoured Susan Fowler’s incredible story of strength — “Whistleblower” — and you should too. Right now.
The bravery this woman demonstrated, telling a story of harassment and mistreatment that is sadly prevalent, is as important. The strength it must have taken her to press “publish” on her blog post, not knowing the impact or the consequences, is simply staggering.
Her story shines a light on what women confront every day. And men may either see it happening or are perhaps a party to, and in any case most certainly are not doing enough about ending the behavior.
MEN DON’T SEE OR FEEL WHAT WOMEN EXPERIENCE
That’s right. Women put up with significant – for lack of a better term – abuse – that men simply don’t. And worse, that men don’t even see it or are aware of it. They may not be aware of it for benign reasons – perhaps you can’t see what you haven’t yet experienced yourself. And they may not be aware of it because they are the perpetrator of the abuse. But the difference between the paths men and women traverse each day is real, and significant.
There’s the sexual abuse of being cat-called when walking down the street. Being touched inappropriately and the unwanted and unwelcome hugging. Or being told something offensive – a joke or a reference to their body – and then being admonished for not going alond with “the joke.”
Put another way, men simply don’t worry about the following:
Walk down a street at night, by themselves
Go for a run or bike ride, by themselves
Walk past a group of the opposite sex
Meet a member of the opposite sex in a business context without worrying about a sexual advance
I have lost count of the women who have told me this is their DAILY life. This list is as sobering as it is horrifying. And men never worry about having any of these circumstances happen to them. And what they don’t see, they often don’t feel or believe.
WHAT SUSAN DESCRIBES IS REAL
Being a woman is hard enough, but what’s worse is not even being able to do your job – the one place which should be a safe place to be yourself and do your best work. And in the last ten years of my career, the more I took the time to speak with the women on my teams and in the companies I have worked for, I can say that Susan’s treatment is not uncommon.
I have spoken to tens of women who have described major and minor acts of abuse. There’s the daily intellectual abuse of being talked over, having ideas appropriated, or being simply ignored or dismissed because they are women. And then there’s sexual abuse or even assualt. And as Susan so bravely points out, there can be shocklingly little in terms of protecting women, with limited or no options to respond.
Susan Fowler is courageous because she wrote about what she experienced not knowing what the consequences would be for her. And the consequences in the short term were huge — (did she lose her job? Spell out the consequence for those who don’t remember the details of the story). And, we learn in the book, this was not her first experience speaking out and paying dearly for her bravery and honesty. What she endured at Penn pursuing her degree (or rather, degrees) was horrifying.
READ WHISTLEBLOWER, NOW
Please buy and read Whistleblower. It will show you in searing detail what it is like to be a woman in a male-dominated culture. It is extreme. Uber was much worse than many companies, but what she experiences there is a reflection of what women experience in general as they make their way through careers, and life.
Thank you, Susan for being brave enough to share your story. We all now have the obligation to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
I’ve written a fair amount about equality in the workplace and the need to understand and empathize with people who are not in positions of power and authority – here, here, here, here, here, and here. Empathizing is critical to how we will get gender and racially balanced leadership teams and workforces.
And when you happen to be in a position of power and authority – like white males – you simply do not see or experience the headwinds, aggression, obstacles, and outright discrimination that the people in the minority do.
I’ve been blogging since 2008, and in that time the comments I have gotten on my blogs have fallen into two categories: Generally complimentary, and machine-driven manufactured comments meant to drive some SEO agenda (I think). I approve every human generated comment, and trash or mark as spam every machine-generated comment.
Over the weekend I got this comment on this blog post I published:
I am one to be transparent and run to the controversy, not away from it. So of course I approved it. It is so over-the-top, and so out of character.
In almost twelve years of blogging I am experiencing the first troll. Perhaps this is a badge of honor. I’ve finally arrived. But to me it highlights the difference between what me – a white male – experiences online, and what women and minorities do.
I am a serious car fanatic, and one of my favorite publications focused on car nuts like me is Jalopnik – the writing is super high quality, and they intentionally focus on writing with diverse viewpoints. Their writers and editors are comprised of men, women and minorities. Intentionally.
So it came as no surprise that Jalopnick exposed the horrifying difference in treatment that their male writers and editors experience from their female editors and writers do. Horrifying.
You don’t need to look far or wide to see how prevalent this imbalanced treatment is. Just follow an independent woman on twitter and you’ll see the different paths men and women encounter online. Here’s one. Susan Fowler. From yesterday.
Follow @susanthesquark
Yes, I’ve got a troll on my blog. Yes he/she said nasty things. It’s easy for me to let this blow by – I am secure in the knowledge I am none of what trash is being thrown at me – but women get 100x this. Every day. It’s not so easy to let that volume of crap blow by you.
And as my wife would remind me, the difference between me and this troll is that tomorrow morning they will wake up as a troll.
So, “CML” thanks for reminding me. Reminding me that tiny acts of aggression directed to me are just that. Tiny. And are nothing compared to what women (and minorities) deal with. Every day.
I want to tell you about a serial entrepreneur I know in the small town I used to live in.
When my wife and I moved the family to Wisconsin in 2001, the state was “trending” — its economy was fairly strong and it was attracting entrepreneurs who were finding like-minded folks interested in bringing new ideas to life away from the intensity of the coasts. (This changed during the recession, and Wisconsin, at least, hasn’t really recovered.)
The region in general is one where there is not a lot of risk taking. For good reason — if you’re a farmer you control so little of what might make your season successful, you can’t count on abundance every year. Taking risks is hard, and being bold even harder. When I was a venture capitalist looking at investments in the Midwest and as an executive at a technology firm in the Midwest I ran into the same thing — a very complicated relationship with being bold.
That entrepreneur I know there, while born and bred in Wisconsin, seems to have the same high tolerance of risk that I do. And, like me, when they see a problem or opportunity they have a viable solution for, they can’t not do it — they simply just can’t let it go.
Let me give you an example. In our college town of about 14,000 residents — only about 8,000 are full-time residents (the rest are students living in rentals who generally leave over the summer) — a small farmer’s market in a parking lot of a hardware store on the edge of town brings a dozen or so produce, honey, and other vendors together with the people who want those things on Saturday mornings. People drive in, pick up what they need, chat with a vendor or two, maybe stop into the hardware store, and leave.
It totally works in terms of a marketplace, but it misses a bigger opportunity — creating a space that could bring the community together and foster business, cultural and social growth.
The entrepreneur I know was a founding board member of a downtown revitalization organization that was frequently asked by community members to bring the market downtown, where there are parks and greenspaces designed for public events and businesses that could use the added foot traffic. Multiple times the group reached out to the Saturday market — once going as far as scouting locations with them — but the Saturday market always ultimately declined to move downtown.
Everyone saw this as a problem with just one solution: get the Saturday market to move downtown. When the City Council asked the downtown group to try, once more, to establish a downtown market, the entrepreneur went outside of the box and proposed adding a second weekly market instead.
They were met with “Why do that, when we already have a farmer’s market?” and “Are you going to be able to get enough vendors or enough visitors and customers?” and “Isn’t it too late to start a market this year?” The entrepreneur didn’t know the answer to any of these questions, but they were willing to try anyway. So they proposed 1) a team of key stakeholders, including vendors from the Saturday market, to plan the market, and 2) that the new market be a pop-up, a proof of concept, to make people feel less anxious about the risk.
This is where their world and my technology startup world have a high degree of alignment. Starting a tech company is one long slog through “won’t big company X just kill you?” or “that’s not going to get to scale” — in both of our cases you create something by focusing on the very small number of reasons why it will succeed while ignoring the substantially larger number of reasons why it will fail.
The entrepreneur led a team through the process of researching the market, engaging key constituents such as city officials and understanding their concerns so they could be addressed, deciding what kind of market they wanted to be (Grower only? Arts and crafts? Dog-friendly? Live music? Food carts? More about the quantity of options or the quality of options?) and then, finally, deciding when and where it would happen. Subgroups focused on critical operations needed to make the market happen: working with the city streets division and the police to ensure public safety and needed infrastructure like trash pick up and caution cones; attracting vendors mid-season (to reduce perceived hurdles for risk-intolerant vendors, the entrepreneur had the key insight of waiving vendor fees for the first year); and getting the word out to the community, among others.
With clarity of vision and a well-thought-through plan, the team launched Whitewater City Market on July 21, 2015. The planned layout was for eight vendors: 17 showed up. By week five, 45 vendors were coming, and the community was showing up in droves.
The entrepreneur and their team worked furiously to keep up: collecting stats, taking surveys, meeting every week to assess what went well, what didn’t, and adjusting accordingly. And with clear consistent communication and a continuous process improvement approach — the market came to feature local craft beer and kombucha and moved from its initial location to one that provides more shade, among other improvements — the number of weekly vendors grew to 60 (after swelling to 90, a number unsustainable for the size of the town), and the visitor count routinely exceeded 1,000.
This is significant in a city of 8,000 full-time residents. Imagine creating — out of thin air — a forum that brings more than 10% of a community together. Every week. 52 weeks a year. Because, by popular demand, the market runs year-round, moving inside a local library on Saturday mornings November through April where about 20 vendors offer eggs and kombucha and bread and winter vegetables and aquaponically grown greens and the like. The market is sustainable, generates income for vendors and its parent organization, and supports two part-time paid internships.
And there are numerous unseen benefits to the market. In recent years the community lost its local grocery store, so the need for locally produced food is even more critical. The market offers “incubator” spots free of charge to new vendors for up to three markets so they can test whether there’s a market for what they have. Because there are two markets in town — the other one continues to happily plug along — having two places to sell his produce helped at least one farmer stay in business and on their farm.
And the large number of customers make for fast innovation: the market’s honey vendor went from testing home-brewed kombucha with customers to bringing it to the market, launching Komboocho Brewing, selling it at multiple markets and finally commercially canning and bottling it and making it available in retail locations in less than two years.
The Whitewater City Market is also the only place I know where you can get your axe sharpened while enjoying a wood-fired pizza.
Truly a success story, and one of many I can tell you about this person. Before I introduce the entrepreneur, tell me — who did you imagine them to be?
If you pictured a man, you wouldn’t be alone. The image most people tend to have when you say “entrepreneur” is generally about mostly men building high technology companies. Lots of growth. Computer science nerds. Engineering chops.
What if I told you that entrepreneur was my wife, Kristine?
I wrote earlier about the painful lessons Kristine and I learned when we decided she would leave her career to care for our children and I would focus on my career. It did my career well — I’ve spent it entirely in high growth technology startups and as a venture capitalist. Hers, not so much. So, over the years she’s thrown her excess capacity into side projects that combine her strategic ability to see viable solutions to an unmet need and and her dogged focus on process and communication to actually get the job done.
The more I witnessed the success and trajectory of the Whitewater City Market, the more it became apparent that I was, in fact, married to an incredible entrepreneur. Starting a city market was exactly about seeing a need no one else has seen — or, if they had the idea, was unwilling or unable to see through to fruition. Because, in life as as in tech startups — ideas are cheap; it’s execution that matters.
And the skill and insight to do this is the same whether you run a tech startup or a nonprofit. The need to deeply believe in the value of your solution in the face of — best case, aggressive indifference, but more often disbelief or opposition — is exactly the same. And the need for funding, to be constantly fundraising and making due with what your financing will support — also exactly the same.
Don’t believe me? Let’s see what key challenges both for-profit and nonprofit leaders face:
Identifying a truly unmet need. That’s easy to say. Maybe it’s better framed as “seeing the potential for a solution when no one else does.” It’s the same whether you are building a software-defined anything or bringing a community together.
Assembling a leadership team. Whether you’re a venture-backed startup or a community market manager, finding competent leaders who can scale what you’re doing is hard. And essential.
Leading. Leading with a capital “L” is essential to any business breaking new ground. This is so much more than leading employees and volunteers. It’s about orchestrating buy-in from all the people and entities that have an influence on your idea. Investors, partners, government entities, neighbors, and even competitors — they all need to see the potential and follow.
Communicating a vision. This is inextricably linked to leading. But in a nonprofit you are leading people whose compensation is not financial. Communicating a vision to inspire volunteers is sure a lot harder than doing it for folks you are paying to listen to you.
Orchestrating change. I mentioned before, in both for-profit and nonprofit startups the biggest execution challenge a CEO will face is orchestrating the massive change this new opportunity is going to require. It requires focusing the one reason you will succeed and ignoring the tens or hundreds of reasons why you might fail.
Persisting despite setbacks. Another key quality of leading is pushing yourself and your team over the hurdles and regrouping and persisting when you hit a wall — and you will. Managing setbacks and outright failure is one of the most difficult and most vital aspects of leadership.
It’s pretty much the same challenges — the difference is in how we reward success (or not). But despite the similarities, I have seen the bias against non-profit street cred first-hand when my wife and I go someplace and meet people, frequently other folks from the tech industry. When they ask what I do and I explain, there’s this instant acceptance and validation. And all I usually say is something like “I ran marketing at a cloud computing company.” And truly, all my companies have ever done is solve a fairly technical problem that, unless you’re in DevOps or are a CTO, you won’t understand or appreciate. But I get instant credibility and interest.
When Kristine explains what she does, the conversation path is short and awkward, and she is generally received with what amounts to “well isn’t that nice, you’re helping people.” I have seen the eyes glaze over, and I have rarely heard anyone ask a follow-up question. It really annoys me, because that rigid mindset is the kind of mindset that prevents seeing an incredibly successful serial entrepreneur at the top of her game.
I say “serial” entrepreneur, because the market is just one of the side gigs she manages on top of her day job in marketing and communications at the university in town. She’s not unlike Marc Beniof, who saw the potential for software-as-a-service and faced a full decade of “smarter” people telling him his idea would never work. (That idea was SalesForce.com.) Originally I’d compared her to Elon Musk, who started and runs multiple companies, but but both my wife and my daughter pointed out that he is rather creepy in terms of his relationships with women.
What’s the tie-in with Beniof and Musk? In the same way people wonder how Elon Musk can run three companies at once, the people in our community (and I) wonder how Kristine can run all three of the businesses she is the founder and CEO of (more on the other two in another blog post) in addition to her day job at UW-Whitewater. She does it because she can’t not do it and she puts in the hours to make it happen. Just like all the entrepreneurs I know.
So why am I writing this? It’s hard not to acknowledge that this is most certainly a love letter to my wife. But it’s also a letter of admiration to an inspirational entrepreneur from a guy who spent 30+ years building technology startups and lamenting that people starting and running “nonprofit” businesses are not seen as peers to people running for-profit businesses. And when I say “people” — I really mean women as well as people from diverse backgrounds.
Kristine isn’t just “behaving entrepreneurially” but is in fact a kick-ass serial entrepreneur. Maybe you have one in your community. You should tell them that.
Something I have just loved about being in the venture capital business is the people I’ve met, running businesses I did not fund. And of those there are a few I found so relevant to my own interests, and with founders who had such passion and integrity, that I continued to meet with them well after saying “no.” Trying to be a productive sounding board, making introductions, passing along knowledge or experience where it seemed helpful.
It’s always been such a pleasure to get the updates from these CEOs, they arrive when you least expect them and it’s exciting to see how things are developing, where the connection is no longer the possibility of financing, but a genuine interest in the business and a relationship with the CEO/team.
Dustin Hubbard of Paperspine is one of these. His company offered a subscription service for books. Physical books. He had the idea for his company after finishing a book, and having no room for it in his already jammed bedside table. So, he planned and planned, left his job at Microsoft, started and ran Paperspine out of his garage.
Paperspine worked really well, and solved problems that people cared about. It probably saved my family hundreds of dollars, just with my 16 year-old daughter, a voracious reader, and who routinely dropped tens of dollars at bookstores, only to read the books once. She loved Paperspine. She was on a five book out at once subscription at one point, and it enabled more massive reading without bankrupting her.
And while Dustin had gotten Paperspine off the ground with funding from friends and family, he couldn’t raise his next round of financing – in a market where raising money is almost impossible anyway. But he applied himself to solving this problem with every ethical means imaginable. Cut costs to get to break even, went back to work at Microsoft, tried to expand into ebook rentals.
Dustin and I spoke every 45-60 days, where he would walk me through his latest set of challenges, his ideas to address them, and we’d then spend the next hour testing his assumptions, plans, and brainstorm solutions. But he always arrived prepared and ready to dive into a meaningful discussion, and sometimes I could help, other times I think he just valued the opportunity to have someone outside the company to run his thinking by.
But for many reasons, some within in his control, many outside it, he was unable to get his next round of financing. And he seemed to be reaching the limit of how much this business was encroaching on his life, quality of life, and family.
So, last night I was truly saddened but not necessarily surprised to receive an email from Dustin, saying that he was closing the doors. I can only imagine how hard this was for him, how heartbreaking.
And he closed off his dreams for Paperspine with the kind of grace and thoughtfulness that we should all take note of, and admire. You should read his final blog entry, a real fitting testimonial to a worthy business, and an incredibly decent founder. And you can see pictures of his “warehouse” in his garage, and learn more about how he took his idea and brought it to life.
His wife framed this so well, reminding him that “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
That phrase captures the essence of what it means to take an idea that crossed your mind, and have the courage to start a company to bring that idea to life. And you bring it to life focused on why it will and should succeed, while also keeping, in a separate place, the knowledge that there are many reasons why it could fail.
Dustin, you should be very proud of what you accomplished and learned these past two years, but you should also be very proud of how you ran your company, and how you finished. Well done, not painless, but well done, indeed.
This is one of those sayings in the startup world that is so accepted that it’s crossed the border of familiarity and become a full-time resident of the land of trite.
Guess who coined it? Steve Jobs. That’s right, Steve Jobs, when he was getting the Macintosh off the ground. It’s a phrase we used at RealNetworks a lot, and one that my partners and I use as a result.
But that it’s trite doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant or true. It is. Absolutely.
And it’s a subtle but important concept to really understand. What do A-players do for you? Everything. Most important, it’s the tone they set in the organization and their influence on the behavior and performance of others. The hiring is critical too, but that’s a byproduct of everything else.
A-players are at the top of their game. This means they know the difference between good and great. In the work they do, and in the standards they set for those around them and those in their organizations.
A-players aren’t threatened by someone better than they are. Rather, they’re relieved. That stuff they were struggling with? They’re happy to get that into the hands of someone who can run with it, faster and more nimbly. How liberating.
A-players know what they don’t know. A corollary to the point above is that A-players know when they don’t know something, and ask questions. They have the security to not need to know the answer to every question, and know how valuable intellectual curiosity is.
A-players can’t tolerate C-players. So they make sure the C-players are replaced. And guess what? The rest of the organization is relieved and inspired. They know who the C-players are, and have felt the drag on performance. It may sound harsh, but it’s true.
To me the most essential capability A-players bring to an organization is the tone they set for it. Their definition of “good” is so much greater than a B or a C player’s, it’s as if they’re speaking a different language. In fact they are, and it’s critical the organization you’re in all speak the same language.
This is why starting up companies is so liberating for A-players. I remember when I was at LSI Logic in the early days, fresh out of college with my head spinning in this startup. The CEO, Wilf Corrigan, made a comment to me once about why he loved being CEO of LSI Logic so much more than being CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor (which he had been before founding LSI). He said “because I created a company with only people I wanted to have there, not ones I inherited.” At the time the answer sounded sensible, but now I realize what he meant was he could hire A-players from the start.
But don’t get me wrong. A-players are not a homogenous bunch. There’s a huge, huge spectrum of abilities and characteristics among them. Some can be incredibly thoughtful and compassionate, others can be intellectual bullies and seemingly heartless. But the connective tissue that binds them all together? They know where to set the bar/standard and how to hold themselves and everyone around them to it.
I saw Man On Wire for the first time in February; I’d read a snippet somewhere about this being the story of the man who tight-rope walked between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974. And at a certain level, that’s exactly what this movie is about. It’s exquisite. The tight-rope walker, Philippe Petit is almost a caricature, his vision and ambition equal parts boundless and focused. I’ve seen the movie three times now, and each time it’s more revealing.
What viscerally strikes me is how it tells the story of starting up a company. This is all about having an idea so audacious it’s almost not believable to someone who hasn’t drunk your kool-aid, yet. It’s about staying focused on the one reason why you will succeed and not the 10,000 reasons why you will fail.
Man On Wire reveals four super-compelling principles that underscore what it’s like to be in a startup, and if you haven’t been in one, it’s a wonderful way to get a sense for what it feels like to be there:
A meticulously constructed plan, discarded. Philippe Petit spent six years planning this act, including building scale models of the towers’s roofs, constructing a tight-rope the same length as the towers in a field, and on and on. And guess what? The day of the “coup” huge elements of the plan had to be thrown out, the real world just didn’t cooperate. This is “why the numbers in your operation plan are wrong” writ larger than life.
Repeated visualizations of the outcome. This is one of the critical mechanisms to ensuring you’re focused on why you will succeed. Philippe from the moment he learned of the Towers construction, visualized walking between them. For years and years visualized walking that wire, how he would do it and succeed. This is critical when you only get one shot at an opportunity, like he had.
Significant emotional toll. Getting something done that’s ambitious, with a visionary leader means you will do things that are difficult and way outside your comfort zone. You will find out who the chicken killers are, who can be relied on and who can’t, and most importantly what you can rely upon yourself for. It’s messy and painful, and you will be different as a result of this experience.
The fear of not succeeding. Philippe’s obsession was on success. Startups are all about being laser focused on why you will succeed, and your only fear is success NOT happening. I just can’t say this enough. People who are afraid of failure may very well get great things done, but just not at startups.
For me the most piercing and fiercely honest confession of the entire movie is when Philippe describes the moment when he committed himself to walking that wire. A simple shifting of weight from the foot resting on the tower to the foot resting on the wire. Silent and internally deliberate.
Compare/contrast this with the article in this April’s Outside Magazine about why people participate in risky sports, and profiles BASE-jumperTed Davenport. Neuroscientist Russell Poldrack asserts that there are three ingredients to risk taking: desire for adventure, relative disregard for harm, and acting on your desires without fully thinking them through. That last factor strays way, way too far into the landscape of recklessness and separates Philippe from Ted. There was nothing reckless about Philippe Petit. Deliberate, honest, ambitious, meticulous.
So see this movie for the reasons I outline above. Also, let yourself ask the other questions. Like “how can someone afford to spend six years planning this”? How “real world” is that? We’re not getting the full story here, but it sure is enjoyable.
Over the past few weeks I’ve had a series of conversations with people about what makes an effective networker, and following up my post about the Seattle 2.0 Awards event, “networking” seems like a timely/relevant topic.
To me networking is the ability to develop a real and sincere personal relationship with someone around a topic that the two of us find interesting, relevant, and important. It’s bidirectional, about giving and getting.
No surprise it has nothing to do with LinkedIn or Facebook. Just look at the About LinkedIn page: “We believe that in a global connected economy, your success as a professional and your competitiveness as a company depends upon faster access to insight and resources you can trust.” This is under the heading Relationships Matter.
Wait a second, this is about stuff for you, it’s not about relationships.
Networking is about taking “what goes around comes around” to heart, and focusing on what you give to someone, beginning with an understanding of that other person. It’s creating some durable residual value through a conversation, and the goal is to produce a lasting memory of you and your talent/intellect. Along the way they’ll learn about you, but that’s secondary; it’s the byproduct.
OK, but this can be scary to do. You are going to reach out to someone you don’t know or know well and ask for something. In some aspects, this puts you in a situation similar to public speaking (and we all know how comfortable that can be for people). You need to “perform” and expose some vulnerabilities. It gets a lot less scary for me when I don’t view this as networking, and instead view this as a way to form and nurture a personal relationship.
Perhaps in this first conversation you do have a favor to ask, or maybe you just want to establish the relationship, or have this person keep an eye out for a role or opportunity relevant to you. It’s this slice of memory that will provoke them to make the introduction you just asked for, remember your name and repeat it to a relevant contact, or to take your call and grant you a favor someday later when you ask it.
I do this all the time for people, and I don’t mind it one bit. As a matter of fact, I love it. I just did it while writing this post. Someone I know has taken on an ambitious consulting project, and a former colleague of mine who has since become a rock-star marketing exec could help her out. I loved connecting them, a good fit of two thoughtful, talented people – who I have real and sincere personal relationships with.
This is taking your values as a person and applying them in a professional context (something I touched on in an earlier post) and doing this in an interpersonally “deliberate” manner.
And then I thought, well there is networking I hate and am not comfortable with. It’s the “forced” networking of work-related events – when you’re in a crowd and making the small talk that on occasion produces an interesting and memorable discussion. This is perverse because in my role as a VC a big part of my job is to get out into the market, to attend events, and to “network.” I am horrible at small talk, and I admire people who can establish ease and comfort quickly with someone new, and find some common ground. I am still learning here.
But I approach this in the same way I had to learn to speak in public. It doesn’t mean I’m always comfortable, it just means I’ve trained myself to do it. And there are a lot of conversations along the way that just seem to fill space and time, but there are also those moments when I meet someone where we can establish an actual, meaningful conversation. And then I’m right back in my comfort zone.
Jenny Hall has graciously agreed to a guest post. Jenny was the CEO of Trendi.com, a social networking destination focused on young women’s fashion that was shut down in October of 2008, and discusses what she learned as a first-time CEO through the startup and eventual failure of Trendi.
This blog focuses on this juncture of success, failure, and finding the meaning from each. I think you’ll enjoy what Jenny tells us through her first-hand experiences at Trendi. Thank you, Jenny, for being OpenAmbition’s first guest writer.
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I really don’t like failure, but I know it’s one of the best sources of learning. I learned a lot the past few years working at a startup, and I learned even more as a result of it failing.
I joined Trendi.com in March of 2007 as the head of marketing and I ended at Trendi in October of 2008 as the last employee and CEO. We had investors, a smart team, a fabulous domain name, a popular blog and so much more going for us- so many reasons to succeed– yet we failed.
When people ask me “what happened?” I usually say we ran out of money. That’s the cop-out answer- running out of money is a symptom of the underlying issues. I think our underlying issues were communication related (unclear communication with each other, of expectations, and with our customers) and experience related (being young, excited, wanting to do it all and getting nothing done.)
I learned lessons from the mistakes we made as a company and my personal mistakes. Of the many lessons learned, these are the ones that stand out the most to me.
Your target audience should be so excited about your product that they’re pushing you to launch, even if it’s crappy when it launches.
I joined Trendi after the founder received funding for his idea. (I know- that never happens! We were lucky.) I talked to my target market occasionally, but didn’t seek their regular input for 2 reasons- 1) I trusted the investors and founder were right in their beliefs that the idea was a winner and 2) I was afraid of the reaction if I discovered we were wrong and proposed changing the concept.
I should have let my market share what they value, even if it differed from what we wanted to create. Sometimes we get caught up in what we’re building, fall in love with it, and fail to realize other people don’t see it the same way. It’s like parents with ugly babies (hey, there ARE ugly babies) that filter out all negative comments because they’re so in love with what they created. Trendi was, in some ways, my ugly baby.
Launching a product your market is begging to use, even with a few rough edges, will have more success than a fully developed site that doesn’t add any value. Plus, you’ll tie your market emotionally to the product. They feel invested and valued and voila- you have your first product evangelists. Furthermore, their input is the ammunition needed when confronting a team, investors, or a board about why a major change needs to take place.
Keep the focus simple and narrow.
Once you know what your audience values, keep your focus only on the features you need. Trendi started out (on paper) as a simple 8-page design. We quickly escalated the site to include a robust back end, picture management system, full social network, etc.
Extra features added time to our launch, increased the burn rate and made the user experience…fragmented. We assumed the users would like what we built only to find out they didn’t like or use all the features and it was difficult for them to figure out the ‘point’ of the site when they arrived.
We over-built Trendi for one main reason: We didn’t have a plan.
Sure, we had some general milestones, but we didn’t have an actionable, communicated business plan. When there is no plan, startup employees turn into hormonal 13 year olds with severe ADD. Anything catches their attention and can change the intended course of action. What are the competitors doing? Why don’t we have this cool feature? Let’s make it pink! No grey! We need a YouTube video STAT! (Get the idea?)
People often ask where our board was during this process and I’m embarrassed to say we didn’t have a formal board. We had our investors who would give us time when they could and we had some friends we would call on informally…but no board to help us keep focus.
Don’t do it just because all the cool kids are doing it.
There were an onslaught of “social shopping” sites in 2006 and early 2007. We jumped onto that trend and while it’s important to know the trends and competitors, it’s more important to figure out what your substantive differentiation is, how that difference adds value and how to make money because of it.
This is a mistake businesses and people make all the time- doing something because everyone else is doing it. Why do we feel more comfortable when we’re doing what everyone else is doing?
I now know questioning the trends and value proposition needs to be done regularly- at least monthly- to ensure the choices made are in the best interest of the company.
Hire only when it’s absolutely needed.
Everyone should be fully utilized before anyone else is hired and increasing the number of employees doesn’t always speed up the launch. For a company like Trendi, we probably only needed a CEO, two developers, and a designer. Ideally the CEO would have been someone who deeply understood the target market, could raise money, inspire the team, and was a stellar marketer, writer or able to contribute another key skill.
Instead, we were almost a year into the project and 15 employees deep before our Angel (who owned the majority of Trendi at that point) stepped in and made a drastic change that involved laying off most of the employees.
Yowza. Hard lesson learned. The team stayed lean and more productive after that.
If it won’t matter in 3 months, don’t spend too much time on it.
We could spend a whole day talking about how our rating system would look or a week bantering back and forth about a press release. I should have asked myself – will this matter in 3 months? If it won’t matter then, why spend too much time on it now? Time is a precious commodity in a startup and should be spent on what matters the most- quickly building a product your customers love.
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Funny how our resumes show our successes and we take full credit, yet we leave off the failures and if they come up, we blame others. I wish I could blame Trendi’s failure on other people and circumstances, but I can’t. No startup has it perfect- we all deal with difficult employees, investors and economic strains. I have to accept that as a company we made mistakes, but I also have to look back and accept my personal contribution to those mistakes.
Accepting the personal mistakes hurt my ego. I screwed up and it made me question my ability to lead others, my knowledge as a marketer and my future ability to start another business. But somewhere in facing my failure and accepting these mistakes, I was able to learn how I can be a better leader, new things I can try as a marketer, and that I do have the strength to try again.
I always hope for success and aim high, but I now face failure with a humility and thankfulness I didn’t have before. Ignoring failure only hurts you later- you can stuff it away and try to pretend it didn’t happen, but it’ll bite you in the butt at some point. I know that if I face failure as a teacher (a harsh one, but still a teacher) I’ll become stronger and smarter.
I like tea, Thai food and good happy hours. If you want to join me in Seattle for any of these, email me at jennymhall@gmail.com.
I wanted to let you know that OpenAmbition will be showcasing its first guest post, from Jenny Hall, former CEO of Trendi.com, which was a social networking destination focused on young women’s fashion that was shut down in October of 2008. Jenny will be sharing what she learned as a first-time CEO through the success and eventual failure of Trendi.
I met Jenny the first time a little over a year ago, when she was trying to raise a Series A financing for Trendi, and for reasons I explained to her, my partners and I were not able to fund her company. Jenny touches on a few of the reasons in her post on Monday, but in many respects, what she describes are what many entrepreneurs wrestle with in an emerging but crowded market, where so much is learned in real-time.
Like with many of the entrepreneurs I am fortunate enough to encounter, she and I have kept in touch, and when she stopped by my office a few weeks ago to tell me about her next startup idea, the subject of Trendi of course came up. Jenny talked me through some of what she had learned, and how valuable the failure of Trendi had been for her personally (but not painless for her, for her employees, or for her investors).
When we moved on to discussing her next startup idea, it was inspiring to see how much was informed by what she had learned through Trendi’s failure, how she had embraced what many would have tried to forget or move on from. And so it seemed like she had a story to tell that the followers of this blog could relate to, find interesting, and hopefully find some meaning in too.
Open Ambition 